STORY ARCHIVE

Are We Alone? (part 1)

Will we find ET within the next ten years? Dr Frank Drake thinks there’s a good chance we will.

Catalyst reporter Graham Phillips met up with the grandfather of the search for extraterrestrial radio signals who says we’ll know if there’s alien life out there very soon. This story looks at NASA’s preparations to build a new space telescope which will detect Earth-like planets around other stars.

Along the way we’ll meet another leader of this new search for ET, Dr Jill Tarter. She’s actually the real-life character depicted by Jodie Foster in the Hollywood movie 'Contact'. Her research institute is currently developing a new radio telescope which will listen for signals from those alien Earths.

Part two – ‘Alien Contact’ follows next week: How can we communicate with aliens and what would we do if they communicated with us?

TRANSCRIPT

Narration: Is there anybody out there? We might soon know. Astronomers are about to build a new radio telescope that will hunt down ET much faster. That incredible moment of contact could be just around the corner says Frank Drake, the grandfather of SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Dr Frank Drake: I think there’s a good chance that we will find another civilisation within ten years, which means - I think - within my lifetime.

Narration: One of Frank’S protégés - Dr. Jill Tarter - is a leader in the new SETI search. Actually, she’s the real-life Jodie Foster in that movie Contact, where astronomers did make contact. She’s at the privately funded SETI Institute in Silicon Valley.

Narration: Jill actually went on set. And yes, she says scientifically, the movie was pretty accurate. ET’s message in the movie was one of our own TV signals bounced back at us. Why are we so fascinated with ET?

Dr Jill Tarter: This is the oldest question we’ve ever asked ourselves. Every culture all through time. You look up at the sky and you say are we alone, is anybody else out there and for thousands of years all we could do was ask the priests and the philosophers and the answer you got depended on a belief system. So the rules of the game fundamentally changed in the second half of the 20th century because we had some technology that you could use to try and do an experiment instead.

Narration: Till now that experiment has been using giant radio telescopes like this 300 metre wide dish to comb the vastness of space for alien messages. But large telescopes are expensive to use and unwieldy to move. Jill’s moving onto a new generation telescope…an array of tiny antennas.

Dr Jill Tarter: This is all about doing an antenna array as cheaply as possible …

Graham Phillips: Looks a bit like a farm to me.

Dr Jill Tarter: Ah yes and we just have antennas planted in the old horse paddock

Narration: Jill took me to this old horse barn just out of San Francisco to see the cutting edge new radio telescope in development. This will be the first telescope ever to be fully dedicated to the search for ET. The telescope is a collection of small dishes, which, linked together by computer, act as a single large telescope. This is a prototype. The eventual one, the Allen array, will be enormous.

Graham: How many dishes will there be?

Dr Jill Tarter: There will be 350 dishes. Each one a bit bigger than these.

Narration: The Allen array will be eavesdropping on ET by 2004. It will find his signals faster because it can search so much more of the galaxy.

Dr Jill Tarter: I can look at a lot more stars. Right now my target list is 1,000 stars that are like the sun relatively nearby. That will grow to 100,000 or a million stars with the Alan telescope array and so I begin to explore more of our local neighbourhood in the galaxy.

Narration: But out of all those stars Jill wants to know which ones to focus on…the stars that have Earth-like planets. Well NASA’s about to find out for her.

Narration: The Kepler space telescope will take off in 5 years time. Its sharp eyes, above our distorting atmosphere will be able to see which stars have other Earths. And what’s exciting says one of the project leaders Bill Borucki is the results will be definitive.

Dr. Bill Borucki: Certainly in 10 or 11 years we have all the information we need. But certainly within a month of launch which is in 2007 we’ll be knowing that earths are common around stars. We get that information within weeks of launch.Narration: And Bill’s certain there will be other Earths out there.

Graham: What if you find no earth-like planets in ten years?

Dr. Bill Borucki: That is going to be an astounding discovery because we should find so many. If we find none that means Earth’s are very, very rare. Maybe there is only Earth in the entire galaxy and so it might be time to go on and reconsider becoming a creationist.

Narration: If we do make contact in the next decade, like in the movie, it’ll be big. Frank Drake actually experienced the feeling once when he mistook a satellite for an alien signal.

Dr Frank Drake: When that happens you have a very unusual emotion, which you’ve never had before. The emotion that you’ve discovered something really important and extraordinary, that the whole future of the world is about to change. You get a sort of tingly feeling all over.

Narration: In the movie Jodie Foster got more than a tingly feeling. She built a space-time travel machine from ET’s message and took a trip. But would a scientist really do that?

Graham: So say we find the message, it’s like the movie, we decode it, it’s a time machine, would you go?